Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, companies utilizing e-commerce websites often do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought-after products. Instead, a customer navigating an e-commerce website typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs. Even a customer with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes experiences difficulty in locating a desired product from among hundreds or thousands of offered products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating.
In response to these difficulties, these companies continually strive to make their e-commerce websites more dynamic, compelling, and easier for users to navigate and locate products. To help meet these goals, one recent innovation allows customers to search for a product by tags associated with that product. Tags essentially enable customers, the e-commerce company, or some other entity the ability to easily categorize products. For instance, a customer who has purchased or who views a certain digital camera may tag this camera as “Digital Camera”, “Cool Camera”, or even “Great Gift for Dad”. In instances where the customer tags the camera “Digital Camera”, this camera will appear in a returned listing of products responsive to other customers conducting a tag search for “Digital Camera”.
To further the usefulness of these tags, companies utilizing e-commerce websites strive to increase “tag concordance”. That is, these companies desire to avoid redundancy or splintering of certain highly related tags. Accordingly, among other potential improvements, there remains a need for improving tag concordance for products and other elements on an e-commerce website.